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    Gracchus Babeuf's Avatar Laetus
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    Default The French Revolution: A History

    Cross-posted from my politics/history blog.

    The French Revolution: Interpretations & Causes




    We are not supposed to like the French Revolution too much. We acknowledge the virtues of its founding principles, liberal notions that persist to this day: liberty, equality and fraternity. When it comes to the public killing of aristocrats and royalist sympathizers, however, we condemn the Reign of Terror as an early form of totalitarianism, where the state decides who lives and who dies, who serves the common good and who threatens it. Liberalism praises the slow, organic process of evolution, of gradual reform reached through negotiation and compromise. It opposes the bloody and righteous severing of a new order from the status quo. Such a righteousness crusade, it is claimed, leads to the ends outweighing the means, inevitably resulting in purges and deliberate famines — or even outright genocide. In the popular imagination, the guillotine represents not just the specific time of the Terror, but also an early form of state-sanctioned terrorism. It is the epitome of the state using political violence to quash dissenters and silence critics. In a liberal and pluralistic society such as ours, where freedom of thought and speech are valued, the Terror stands as an aberration, a warning to us that the French Revolution ultimately betrayed its noble goals of bringing France from feudalism to modernity.

    The problem with this perspective is that it presumes peaceful pacts toward progress are the norm. The reality is that harsh departures from the past are sometimes necessary. In the context of the French Revolution, the victory of liberal republicanism was not assured; on the contrary, it was under constant and continuous assault by an array of reactionary forces. Noble émigrés, religious peasants, and foreign invaders all desired a return to the traditional feudal system. Moreover, the revolutionaries themselves competed to shape the final product of their social upheaval. Constitutional monarchists, moderate liberals and radical utopians from the middle class shifted between allegiances with aristocratic reformers, the urban poor and starving peasants as they sought to steer the revolutionary state through uncharted waters to the unknown shore of a more just and prosperous society. Unlike “the Party” in George Orwell’s 1984 that desires only power for its own sake, even the most despotic figures in the latter stages of the Revolution believed they were imposing order to lay the foundation for a better world. They wanted to wreck any chance of the old order restoring itself, and while in the short-term they failed, in the long-run they succeeded. They showed that society arranged according to the feudal era was in essence antagonistic to the class relations created by the socioeconomic and cultural changes witnessed in the 19th century. The Industrial Revolution made the French Revolution unavoidable. The French Revolution in turn has undermined the ability of tyrants and oligarchs worldwide to rule, their very regimes constantly called into question.

    Monarchs wielded political power after the Revolution (and inexplicably still do in many countries), but never in the same way again. Common laborers, though failing to achieve many of their demands, came away realizing the potential of people power. Most importantly, power in France shifted irreversibly to the bourgeoisie. Although many would become supporters of imperialism (under Bonaparte) or the monarchy (the Legitimists and Orléanists), they believed such regimes would be the best for France, not because they desired to exclude themselves from politics. The French Revolution taught its contemporaries and continues to teach future generations about their ability to affect incredible political and social transformations when adequately organized.

    Interpreting the French Revolution

    In academia, debate rages over two rival interpretations of the French Revolution. The classic Marxist interpretation, associated with historians Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul, describes the Revolution as a bourgeois uprising against feudalism to obtain the economic freedom to develop early capitalism. Revisionist historians like Albert Cobban and François Furet argue that the Revolution did not advance the development of France into a capitalist state, and rather than a equalizing event, regard it as a precursor to totalitarianism. In their view, the Revolution was more about barbarism than progress.




    It is rather comforting to find parallels between the killings of the Terror and, say, the killing fields of Cambodia. It is easy to lump the two together and condemn them both. This knee-jerk judgement rests on the fallacious presumption that, historically, liberal democracy has relatively little blood on its hands. Truthfully, liberalism was just as violent as fascism and communism in remaking the social fabric, especially in its promotion of capitalism. Marx never wrote about the French Revolution, but he wrote extensively about the blossoming of capitalism. He makes it clear that capitalism and classical liberal views about free trade and individualism did not grow peacefully out of feudalism; they destroyed it and replaced it. We remain ignorant of this fact because textbooks recount the killing of kings and nobles, but are largely silent on the main victims of early capitalism: the peasants and craftsmen who once enjoyed secure places under feudalism. The turn to commercial agriculture and industrialization that defined the Industrial Revolution uprooted these people and removed their very livelihoods. They could either cling to the old ways or become workers in the new proletariat class. Marx writes eloquently not just about their exploitation under capitalism, but also about their alienation and creation of a false consciousness. People who had at least been connected to their labor under feudalism became unskilled wage-earners. The whole of their economic activity fell under the control of the developing bourgeoisie.

    Even in places where the liberal replacement of feudalism went mostly unopposed, such as England and the nascent United States, regular people suffered in the name of capitalist progress. The major difference between those cases and France is that the bourgeois revolutionaries of the French Revolution attempted to create a new society in a matter of years, not decades or centuries. As we shall see, vested interests fought intensely to deny that. In 1800, it was possible for Jeffersonian republicans to lead a political revolution in the U.S., but in 2016, it is easier to imagine an end to the world than a major change to the political or economic system. Similarly, in 1789, the idea of challenging a feudal system that had ruled France for over 600 years was considered extremist and dangerous. That is, however, what the Revolution sought to do, and in so doing, inspired generations of people to question the present order and struggle to create a better world.

    We should also consider the path France could have taken had it undergone peaceful reform rather than violent revolution. There is no assurance it would have become a liberal democracy. Barrington Moore touches on this in his seminal work on dictatorship and democracies. In Germany and Russia, the nobility allied with the bourgeoisie to organize industrialization through state-directed initiatives. When those countries underwent revolutions circa World War I, the republics that emerged were too weak to rule, leading to states of alternative ideologies. These states attempted to impose their own systems and principles as the liberal order they opposed, but with the swiftness and audacity of the French Revolution. Many observers take this to mean the French Revolution inspired fascism and Bolshevism. It is more apt to say Bolshevism and fascism were inspired by liberalism and how it forged new views of seeing the world. We often take for granted that the default ideas and systems of today were once considered radical and revolutionary.

    The Absolute Monarchy

    In order to understand the causes of the 1789 Revolution, it is necessary to consider both long-standing structural problems as well as more short-term crises that prompted a complete social collapse. To start, France was (ostensibly) an absolute monarchy in 1789, with power primarily centralized in the throne. While we might think feudalism is inherently dictatorial, in fact the opposite is true. The cornerstone of feudalism is vassalage: regional counts and barons ruling at the local level, but swearing their fealty to a higher lord. The king (or queen) was at the very top of the social pyramid, but his (or her) rule depended on the continued obedience of the vassals. To keep those vassals mollified, it was common practice for monarchs to extend their nobles special rights. The most infamous of these was the droit du seigneur (or jus primae noctis) that permitted nobles to have sexual relations with their female subjects on their wedding nights. There is no actual proof French lords (or any European nobles) invoked this right. French nobles did, however, exercise rights to rents from those who worked on their estates or domains, as well as a percentage of the crops harvested by peasants on the nobles’ lands.



    It was not until the 17th century that the French monarchy began to erode the liberties vassals enjoyed under feudalism. These, of course, were the freedoms that protected nobles from the power of the monarchy. For example, French nobles had been able to take complaints on royal overreach to appellate courts called parlements (not to be confused with English parliaments) that would invalidate regal pronouncements if they infringed on convention. (Compare this to the unwritten constitution that still perseveres in British politics to this day.) The 16th century had closed with wars of religion across Europe, as the Protestant Reformation ruptured the glue that held the feudal order together: Catholicism. Cardinal Richelieu, the de facto head of the French government and well-known nemesis to the Three Musketeers in Dumas’ novel, sought to keep France in a strong position on the Continent and to profit from the disorder caused by the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). Local lords were brought to heel and the religious tolerance of Protestants was revoked. Richelieu’s successor, Cardinal Mazarin, furthered these policies until the nobility tried in vain to reassert its power independent from the crown in a series of civil wars that finally ended in 1653. In the meantime, Louis XIV of France, the so-called “Sun King,” grew up as a child king, accustomed to unrivaled power. Under his reign, from 1643 to 1715, France was perpetually involved in wars over succession disputes, expansionism and counter-expansionism. France had become the hegemonic power of early modern Europe and behaved as such, diplomatically and militarily.

    The Aristocracy & Bourgeoisie

    The French nobility, although having lost some of its autonomy, remained quite powerful. The upper ranks of the military and the clergy, the pillars of absolutism supporting the crown, included only nobles. The most affluent attended the royal court at Versailles, engaged in intrigues and entertainment, living off the taxes and duties leveled on the peasants who worked their land. (Some hereditary peers living in rural areas, however, fared little better than the peasants they lived beside.) For those outside the noble class, it was possible to become ennobled through the sale of judicial and administrative offices. In the 17th century, the sale of offices was so common in order to fund constant warfare that, in the 18th century, access to the nobility became much more restrictive. The hereditary nobility had contempt for the bourgeoisie “diluting” their class through the purchase of a savonette à vilain (the commoners’ soap). The bourgeoisie who had already bought their way into the nobility also had incentive to block others from reaching their level, as they wanted their titles to become hereditary as well, securing fortunes for future generations. By 1789, social climbing was still possible, but much more daunting for members of the bourgeoisie. They were paying for the operation of the state, but were excluded from participation: a form of taxation without representation. This was a huge motivation for revolution.



    The very nature of the French economy also discriminated against the bourgeoisie. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, finance minister to the Sun King, had implemented a mercantilist system that featured heavy protectionist policies meant to develop French industries by promoting exports and depressing the demand for imports. Although France never equaled the English or the Dutch in foreign trade, the French state became incredibly powerful in terms of state-led production. The early bourgeoisie were thus merged into the existing feudal structure, overseen by a powerful bureaucracy. As a result, legal defenses of property rights and private economic competition did not blossom; on the contrary, the state reigned supreme in economic matters, just as it did politically.

    As discussed, members of the bourgeoisie that wanted greater power exchanged trade and commerce for titles and fiefdoms. For example, a financial counselor to Louis XIV, Antoine Crozat, rose from peasant stock to become a wealthy merchant before purchasing the barony of Thiers in 1714. Like many other bourgeoisie of his time, Crozat was heavily involved in France’s overseas colonies. In 1712, he received a royal charter granting him dominion over all trading and moneymaking licenses in Louisiana for 15 years. Sadly for Crozat and other bourgeois colonial overlords like him, the once profitable fur trade in North America had diminished, and colonialism on the new continent never prospered for the French empire the way it would for the United Kingdom. Crozat lost around $1 million even with his trade monopoly in Louisiana. When France lost the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) with Great Britain, the peace agreement stipulated that France turn over control of its North American colonies to the British. (It would later regain Louisiana from Spain, only to sell that territory to the U.S. in the Napoleonic era.) France was humiliated, leaving the feudal system in debt and in doubt. Absolutism and mercantilism had made France the strongest country in the world, but perpetual conflict and divergent class interests had taken their toll. The government could no longer take the “commoners” for granted. Importantly, this materialistic conflict also coincided with an intellectual movement that supplied an impetus to bourgeois reformers to challenge the very character of the feudal regime.

    The Enlightenment & Rousseau




    Political change in the late 18th century was synonymous with the Enlightenment, a philosophical revolution that sought to bring the rigor and dispassion of scientific analysis to human behavior, including theories of government. Direct experience and concrete evidence became privileged over blind faith and static doctrines. Operating according to reason and rationality, Enlightenment philosophers argued, educated men could rule themselves rather than be ruled by feudal lords or organized religion. The French philosophes included Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot, the primary editor of the famous secular Encyclopédie, the most famous Enlightenment publication. It embodied the desire to provide general information to the public (or, more accurately, the literate classes.) On political issues, the philosophes opposed arbitrary power or rule through fear and superstition, but fell short of unanimously endorsing participatory democracy and universal suffrage. As men of letters, they believed in their own intelligence and judiciousness, but did not extend this faith to the illiterate, “unenlightened” masses. (It should be noted that U.S. revolutionaries like James Madison, influenced by Enlightenment ideals, argued for the “protection of the minority of the opulent from the tyranny of the minority.”) Most philosophers wanted to remove the obstacles that hindered them from realizing their skills and talents as intellectuals; this was their definition of “freedom.” In terms of enabling the impoverished, uneducated working classes to obtain the same advantages and resources they possessed, the leading lights of the Enlightenment were silent. Still, their strident atheism and devotion to reason pervades all stages of the French Revolution.

    The later, more radical Revolutionary period is more accurately tied to the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He was a contemporary of the Enlightenment philosophes, but philosophically their opposite. In his Discourse on Inequality (1754), he argued that people are innately decent, but that institutions corrupt and degrade them. He admired the “noble savage,” primeval man innocent of education and the sciences, and his ability to live in harmony with the natural world. This looking backward with rose-tinted glasses was anathema to the philosophes. In his commentary on the work, Voltaire wrote: “One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours.” Whereas Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinkers saw higher learning as separating man from beasts, Rousseau believed that human morality in the raw state of nature was rough but organic. “Civilized” society brought with it private property, and by extension, inequality and disillusionment. People come into the world without distinctions or obligations; it is society that confers upon them different backgrounds and statuses, dividing them and driving them into competition with each other.

    This viewpoint would become the foundation for Rousseau’s chief political work, The Social Contract (1762), which would have an immense impact on the French Revolution. He argued against an elective representative system, calling such a system “elective aristocracy,” and supported democratic rights for everyone, including women. Like Hobbes’ Leviathan, the sovereign for Rousseau is the sum of all individuals coming together and forming the “general will” – the conceptual manifestation of what is in the common interest. Each individual, motivated by virtue, willingly pledges himself or herself to the shared general will, as it comprises rudiments of each person’s desire. If there are incongruities about what should be the general will, these conflicting opinions annul each other, leaving the general will to arise naturally. This spontaneous direct democracy may sound utopian, but Rousseau was a romantic. His emphasis on emotion and virtue expressed an extensive estrangement with the world as it was. Rousseau craved dynamism and change, repressed in a cold and conservative feudal culture, and he yearned to restore the suppressed springs of life. Many shared his restive spirit, and it can be perceived in the sentimental novels and poems of Goethe, Pushkin, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth and other Romantic artists. As we shall see, many of the most radical leaders of the Revolution (especially the members of the Jacobin Club) regarded Rousseau as their philosophical guide. His political theory was incompatible with the old order; it had to be overturned and destroyed, with a more virtuous popular democracy created in its place.



    The role of ideology in social revolution is vital. It is important to consider how a new ruling class attempts to convince other classes to assent to its ethical, political and social values. It was not enough for the bourgeoisie to affirm their economic power in their historical moment; they had to transmit their mindsets through cultural power. As the educated class, 18th century intellectuals made a case for “rule by experts” that is still deployed in modern politics. It is the language of meritocracy: rule by talent, not birth. This argument omits that some people are born with more advantages than others. The thinkers who influenced the leaders of the Revolution articulated a negative liberty that suits the bourgeoisie: freedom from government regulation, censorship, and social immobility. This libertarian mentality is still the one most often deployed in our current politics, where government is constantly criticized for its invasion of our private lives, rather than as a democratic system of empowerment for the people.


    Rousseau, however, was a deviation from the norm. He railed against inequality and argued for a positive freedom that would level the playing field in a sort of primitive communism. It would be erroneous to draw parallels between Rousseau and Marx’s scientific socialism, as science and Rousseau’s romanticism are integrally conflicting. It is more accurate to compare Rousseau with the utopian socialists that preceded Marx: Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen. Like Rousseau, these thinkers sought to spread a “new social Gospel” (as Marx and Engels call it in the Communist Manifesto) without paying due diligence to class antagonisms or revolutionary potential. In the manner of other philosophers, Rousseau plucked his idealized republic from his own imagination, more as an intellectual exercise than a program for action. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the social aspect of the French Revolution ran into great difficulty when philosophy was put into practice. The theoretical strength of Rousseau’s work did, however, form a union of bourgeois and working class interests that would take the Revolution in its final decisive direction.


    The Petite Bourgeoisie & Peasantry




    Minor property holders made up the bulk of the lowest stratum of the 18th century French social hierarchy. The vast majority were peasants, emancipated serfs who owned or rented land and made up the backbone of the agrarian economy. They had to pay noble lords for the “right” to use mills and wine presses required for agricultural production. In the main, they were more concerned with the concrete duties of the state — namely, to provide them with bread and security — than the changing of their social existence. As Marx observed, peasants tended to be conservative, prone to protecting their minor holdings and not putting it at risk. It is an underappreciated fact that the French peasantry were instrumental in moderating the Revolution and bringing the Terror period to an end.

    In the cities and towns, factories were still a relatively new development, and the proletarian class was small. There were, however, artisans and craftspeople that produced basic consumer goods. There were also traders and shopkeepers that sold them. Marx referred to this class as the “little” or “petite” bourgeoisie. In the context of the French Revolution, they are known as the sans-culottes, so called because they wore trousers rather than the knee breeches of the upper classes. In 1789, the bourgeoisie had been so squeezed by war and economic crisis that the “little bourgeoisie” was essentially indistinguishable from common urban laborers. Like peasants, their priority for joining the Revolution was greater economic security and the provision of food at fair prices. The sans-culottes saw the benefits of the philosophical principles espoused by the “big bourgeois,” but their continued support for the revolutionary government depended on whether their more immediate basic needs were met. They were willing to give their support to any government that would intervene in the economy to ensure an affordable price for food, whatever its philosophical principles. If the bourgeois members of the Revolution hungered for freedom, the sans-culottes simply hungered for bread.

    Bread and Taxes

    In 1774, newly crowned King Louis XVI appointed the economically liberal finance minister Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. Turgot sought to improve France’s economic situation by liberalizing commerce, subscribing to a “laissez faire” philosophy. This included deregulating the grain industry, which was significantly monitored and policed by the state. Grain merchants tended to hoard their grain rather than sell it, inflating the price and raising their profits. They would also dilute flour with other material, including chalk and grinded-up bone. This caused the working classes to riot in 1775, in the “Flour War.” The riots were put down by force. Although the riots indicated the precariousness of the feudal regime, the negative impact of economic freedom on affordable food was a working class grievance, not a bourgeois one. As such, bread alone fell short of cutting across class differences and inducing revolution. The bourgeoisie would not be motivated to commit to insurrection until the monarchy attempted to do the most vile sin in the eyes of bourgeoisie anywhere, everywhere: the government tried to raise its taxes.

    France had joined the American Revolution around the same time as the Flour War, seeking revenge for the embarrassment England had inflicted on the French by taking France’s North American colonies. The American Revolution succeeded and humbled the English, but it cost France 520 million livres in loans, issued at incredible interest rates. A series of finance ministers all wanted to raise taxes, but French appellate courts all feared higher taxes would place more of a burden on the nobility (especially the bourgeoisie who had bought their way into the nobility precisely to escape taxation). These courts, once rendered irrelevant to royal diktat, reasserted their influence and blocked the increasingly vulnerable crown in its desperate attempt to raise more funds.



    To break the impasse, the king assembled the Estates-General, an assembly made up of representatives from the three estates of the realm: those who prayed (the clergy), those who fought (the nobility) and those who worked (the commoners). It had not been summoned for over a century, and it in no way mirrored the complex and multilayered reality of 18th century French society. It did, however, provide an avenue by which the monarchy could, with the help of the old nobility, impose a greater tax burden on the bourgeoisie. The calling of the Estates-General, however, had a major unintended consequence: it gathered the bourgeoisie together and gave them a platform by which they could express their dissatisfaction with the regime. The concerns of the poor masses went unheeded; the delegates of the Third Estate were uniformly called from the “big” and “little” bourgeoisie. As such, the Estates-General was primed for a bourgeois hijacking.

    A political pamphlet entitled What Is the Third Estate? by Abbé Sieyès became the unofficial bourgeois manifesto. He called for double representation of the Third Estate – that is, the Third Estate having twice as many members as the other two estates combined. He also asserted that all three estates should meet together instead of separately, as was custom. With votes counted numerically rather than by status, the Third Estate would essentially control the political agenda. The nobility and clergy would essentially have token representation but little influence. Most of the representatives from the Second Estate, parish priests rather than bishops and archbishops, sympathized with the Third Estate. This was because many low-ranking priests were the second or third sons of the bourgeoisie. A handful of nobles also defected to the Third Estate, the most famous being Louis Philippe Joseph, Duke of Orleans. He belonged to a cadet branch of the ruling Bourbon dynasty and supported a constitutional monarchy. When the Third Estate finally met in Versailles, in June 1789, it proclaimed itself a National Assembly. Far from semantics, the bourgeois delegates consciously distanced themselves from the Estates-General and thereby all the trappings of the feudal past. The crown was not amused. Barred from their meeting hall, the Assembly met in a nearby tennis court, and swore the Tennis Court Oath: a pledge to not convene until they had drafted a new constitution for France. Public support swung to the National Assembly, especially in the cities.

    Like the American Revolution, the French Revolution was posed to be bourgeois revolution. The old system depended on the fruit of capitalism but shunned capitalists. Encouraged by Enlightenment philosophy, the bourgeoisie made a case for society being constituted around them. Despite their conviction, they preferred reform to violence. The Revolution, however, would not proceed as the bourgeoisie alone wanted; they could not impose themselves on the other classes. The monarchy especially would resist the abandonment of feudalism. The nobility, with some exceptions, wanted to retain their feudal privileges and opposed modifying France’s economic orientation, as they were its main beneficiaries, along with the crown. Most nobles feared what would happen if their minor commercial investments had to compete in a more liberal economy. Some open-minded aristocrats favored a constitution to give certain bourgeois freedoms legal backing, but they did not want to be made a secondary or even symbolic element of society. They were “superior” to the “common” people by their very nature, and did not want to be subordinated to them – especially when some noble families had spent decades clawing their way up from peasant or merchant stock into the upper classes. Those nobles that did defect to the bourgeoisie envisioned some form of advisory role for themselves in the new system, similar to the oversight function of the House of Lords in Great Britain.

    Storming the Bastille



    In July 1789, Louis XVI sacked Jacques Necker, his reformist finance minister. Necker had not respected the Estates-General as anything other than a means toward changing the tax system. It was rumored, however, that he supported political reform if it meant coming closer to resolving France’s major economic problems. The royal dismissal of Necker indicated to the bourgeoisie that the monarchy refused to brook any challenge to its authority. For the working classes, this meant that a suppression of dissent would not be long in coming. They had experienced the pattern over numerous uprisings, including the recent Flour War. The entire Third Estate, bourgeois and laborers alike, realized that the monarchy would use its most powerful extension, the military, to quell any rebellion.

    Both groups sought weapons, and it made sense that arms could be found at the Bastille, a medieval fortress prison that stood in the center of Paris. Its presence represented the antiquated, passé ideas of the Middle Ages. In function, it served a state that operated according to dictatorial measures that afforded no respect to the average person. Bourgeois leaders sought to negotiate with the soldiers holding the Bastille, and even accepted an invitation to breakfast with the fortresses’ governor. Apprehension gripped the sans-culottes that were present, however, as time was not on their side. They were acutely aware that the army would start massacring residents in the poorer Paris districts at any moment. The masses fought their way forward, raging through the prison, releasing inmates and seizing gunpowder. Fighting erupted, but the Bastille governor surrendered when the rebels fixed cannon on his men. The raiders killed the governor and placed his head on the bike. Other members of the garrison also died. The Republic rewarded the original Bastille insurgents with medals, and mostly, they were sans-culottes. They had the most to lose if there was a counterrevolution, and thus were the most proactive in wanting to neutralize a potential reprisal by the state. The “big bourgeoisie” may have dominated the Assembly, but it was the “little bourgeoisie” and the urban poor who directed the Revolution from below.

    In the countryside, the collapse of central authority throughout July 1789 resulted in the “Great Fear,” major peasant revolts that featured improvised farmer self-defense leagues commandeering manor houses. Peasants feared that, with all the unrest in the capital, they would continue to be ignored unless they took matters into their own hands. They also knew that by taking control of noble estates that they would be massacred if the Revolution failed. In the meantime, bandits would exploit the lawlessness of a divided France to prey on the vulnerable peasantry. All this chaos led to the hysterical hoarding of weapons and property. Bit by bit, the regular people of France were dismantling the old regime and throwing their support behind the National Assembly. The slate had been cleared; the question became what new system should be created in place of the old one.

    Bibliography
    Bouton, Cynthia A. The Flour War: Gender, Class, and Community in Late Ancien Régime French Society. Penn State Press, 1993.
    Campbell, Peter. Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720-1745. Routledge, 2003.
    Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution. Duke University Press, 1991.
    Cobban, Alfred. The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
    Collins, James B. The State in Early Modern France. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
    Darnton, Robert. The Literary Underground of the Old Regime. Harvard University Press, 1982.
    Furet, François, and Mona Ozouf. A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1989.
    Hibbert, Christopher. The Days of the French Revolution. William Morrow & Company, 1981.
    Kaplan, Steven L. Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV. Anthem Press, 2015.
    Lefebvre, Georges. The French Revolution Volume I: from its Origins to 1793. Columbia University Press, 1962.
    Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen, and Rolf Reichardt. The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom. Duke University Press, 1997.
    McGarr, Paul. “The Great French Revolution.” International Socialism 43 (1989): 15-110.
    McPhee, Peter, ed. A Companion to the French Revolution. John Wiley & Sons, 2014.
    Moore, Barrington. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Beacon Press, 1993.
    Moote, A. Lloyd. The Revolt of the Judges: the Parlement of Paris and the Fronde, 1643-1652. Princeton University Press, 1971.
    Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. Penguin UK, 2004.
    Steel, Mark. Vive La Revolution. Simon and Schuster, 2003.
    Soboul, Albert. The French Revolution, 1787-1799: From the Storming of the Bastille to Napoleon. NLB, 1974.
    Treasure, Geoffrey Russell Richards. Richelieu and Mazarin. Psychology Press, 1998.

    Coming soon: The French Revolution: The Moderate Stage, 1789-1791
    Last edited by Gracchus Babeuf; June 05, 2018 at 11:47 AM. Reason: fixed spelling and grammar

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    Praeses
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    Default Re: The French Revolution: A History

    Thx, very interesting. Will you be touching on external events like the revolt in the Austrian Netherlands prior to the calling of the estates?

    Quote Originally Posted by Gracchus Babeuf View Post
    ...We are not supposed to like the French Revolution too much....
    Nice touch, opens the subject with suitable equivocation. I recall a quote from the horrible Peter Greenaway's abominable The Cook the Thief his Wife and her Lover when a chap is choked to death with pages from history books and is reported to have said "the French Revolution was easier to swallow than Napoleon" which is certainly true, although its still pretty hard to swallow.
    Jatte lambastes Calico Rat

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    Default Re: The French Revolution: A History

    Quote Originally Posted by Gracchus Babeuf View Post
    In the countryside, the collapse of central authority throughout July 1789 resulted in the “Great Fear,” major peasant revolts that featured improvised farmer self-defense leagues commandeering manor houses. Peasants feared that, with all the unrest in the capital, they would continue to be ignored unless they took matters into their own hands. They also knew that by taking control of noble estates that they would be massacred if the Revolution failed. In the meantime, bandits would exploit the lawlessness of a divided France to prey on the vulnerable peasantry. All this chaos led to the hysterical hoarding of weapons and property. Bit by bit, the regular people of France were dismantling the old regime and throwing their support behind the National Assembly. The slate had been cleared; the question became what new system should be created in place of the old one.
    An interesting thing is that the majority of conscripts during Revolutionary War came from major urban centers and regions surrounding Paris, while few came from countryside and some provinces contributed nearly none (such as Brittany). That might suggest French Revolution was more an urban revolt and control of Revolutionary Government often was only limited to urban centers.
    Quote Originally Posted by Markas View Post
    Hellheaven, sometimes you remind me of King Canute trying to hold back the tide, except without the winning parable.
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    Cameron is midway between Black Rage and .. European Union ..

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    Gracchus Babeuf's Avatar Laetus
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    Default Re: The French Revolution: A History

    Quote Originally Posted by hellheaven1987 View Post
    An interesting thing is that the majority of conscripts during Revolutionary War came from major urban centers and regions surrounding Paris, while few came from countryside and some provinces contributed nearly none (such as Brittany). That might suggest French Revolution was more an urban revolt and control of Revolutionary Government often was only limited to urban centers.
    The Revolution was indeed directed by the urban merchant class in the cities as well as the minor artisans and craftsmen. Peasants, generally, were royalist, anti-secularization, and reactionary. The counter-revolution in the Vendee is a perfect example of this. Precisely because France had resisted the turn to commercial agriculture that occurred in Britain, the peasantry in France was able to rise up and act as counter-revolutionary force. In the end, the alliance between the bourgeoisie and the urban sans-culottes overcame both the peasants and the old aristocratic elite.

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    Default Re: The French Revolution: A History

    Quote Originally Posted by Gracchus Babeuf View Post
    In the end, the alliance between the bourgeoisie and the urban sans-culottes overcame both the peasants and the old aristocratic elite.
    I would not say peasantry was "overcame", as the refuse of contributing manpower throughout the Revolutionary War suggesting countryside was uncooperative silently and urban elites were unable to break the deadlock. It is in fact better to describes Revolutionary War as "Paris versus rest of Europe" as it is quite clear Paris was unable to mobilize whole France saved a few urban centers. This breakdown of national unity due to different political identity would also partially explain why Napoleon wanted to reintroduce monarchy, just like his nephew did 40 years later. In the end, France as a nation perhaps never fully accept Republicanism until 1870s.

    In other words, French Revolution is best to be summarized as "urban folks are trying to mess around while thinking they represented the whole nation, hence brought everyone to hell."
    Last edited by hellheaven1987; June 08, 2018 at 02:06 PM.
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    Hellheaven, sometimes you remind me of King Canute trying to hold back the tide, except without the winning parable.
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    Cameron is midway between Black Rage and .. European Union ..

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    Default Re: The French Revolution: A History

    That's a fine fine and extremely detailed well written piece of historical reference there dude .
    Keep it up .

    "urban folks are trying to mess around while thinking they represented the whole nation, hence brought everyone to hell."
    I agree .
    100% mobile poster so pls forgive grammer

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    Gracchus Babeuf's Avatar Laetus
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    Default Re: The French Revolution: A History

    Quote Originally Posted by hellheaven1987 View Post
    In other words, French Revolution is best to be summarized as "urban folks are trying to mess around while thinking they represented the whole nation, hence brought everyone to hell."
    The idea of “representing the whole nation” did not even exist until the French Revolution, which really constituted the idea of the patrie and modern nationalism. The peasants, as isolated and politically unconscious as they were, would gladly have gone with centuries more of absolute monarchy and Catholic supremacy and France would have gone on being an economically defunct and divided nation. The “third estate” may not have represented everybody, but the idea was never to create a perfectly egalitarian or even democratic state. The model liberal government had a constitution, but could just as easily be a constitutional monarchy as a republic. It fell to the urban bourgeoisie and working classes to defeat the forces of reaction and feudalism, which is exactly what they did. “Hell” was not the bourgeois revolutions of 1789 to 1848 but the fascist movements of the 20th century which were as much a reaction to 1789 as 1917.

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    Default Re: The French Revolution: A History

    The French Revolution: The Moderate Stage, 1789-1791

    In the previous entry, the urban poor of Paris had stormed the Bastille, the medieval fortress in the heart of the French capital. Around the same time, peasants in the countryside had started to seize feudal manors and arm themselves in preparation for predicted royalist reprisals. In July 1789, when news finally reached the royal court in Versailles about the extent of the rebellion, the upper classes clearly perceived that restoring order would require attacking the barricaded people of Paris as well as farmer militias in the provinces. King Louis XVI opted not to use force and went to the city hall of Paris to accept the tricolor cockade that had become a symbol of the Revolution. With this symbolic act, he ceded absolute political power in France to the National Assembly and accepted the challenge to his previously unquestioned authority. At this point, though, he had no cause to fear the dissolution of the monarchy. The Assembly at this early stage was dominated by moderate reformers from the bourgeois and noble classes. Most members hoped to keep the king as a ceremonial figurehead by turning France into a constitutional monarchy.

    The August Decrees & the Declaration of the Rights of Man

    Most Assembly members acknowledged, however, that feudalism had to be dismantled to mollify the anxious peasantry. Accordingly, they issued the August Decrees that abolished feudalism in France. The Decrees did away with many of the feudal benefits enjoyed by the nobility as well as tithes collected by the Catholic Church. It should be stressed, however, that the bourgeoisie retained payments owed to them under the previous system, such as rents. Many bourgeois landowners in fact raised their rents in line with the sum previously reserved for Church tithes, so peasants in effect saved no money. Additionally, peasants had to pay higher taxes levied on them by the Assembly. Even worse, the Assembly mandated peasants to compensate the nobility for the loss of their monopolies. Most peasants refused to pay compensation, however, and ultimately it would be repealed once the bourgeois stage of the Revolution ended. The inconsistency between the abolition of noble benefits with the retention of bourgeois rents demonstrates that the National Assembly in 1789 prioritized middle class demands over working class grievances.

    The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, also passed by the Assembly in August 1789, further underlines the primacy of bourgeois interests in the early Revolution. Not surprisingly, it 160px-1793_equality_anagoriawas heavily influenced by the American Revolution and the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson. It asserted the “natural rights” of men to “liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.” In accordance with Enlightenment ideals, nature itself endowed men of means with the freedom to pursue wealth and prestige without forced subservience to the divine right of kings or the arbitrary rulings of a self-serving aristocracy. Men would, in theory, advance themselves by their merits rather than their bloodlines. Undoubtedly, the Declaration was a positive step for France, at least compared to what came before. It recognized that individuals had inherent value and dignity, and that they deserved more than to be servants of a state that did not afford them even basic rights. For the bourgeois class especially, it was a greatly empowering emancipation from the confining chains of feudalism,

    The Declaration has a tarnished legacy, however, just as the founding documents of the U.S. do when compares their philosophy with their practice. As in the early post-revolutionary U.S., France in 1789 did not truly treat all of its citizens equally, regardless of an abundance of egalitarian rhetoric. There persisted a distinction between the “right” kind of people and those deemed inherently inferior, reflected in the Declaration’s separation of “active” and “passive” citizens. To be considered an “active citizen” able to fully participate in politics, a person had to be a property-owning adult man. Those deemed “passive citizens,” including all the women of France, could not vote or otherwise be politically engaged. This means that the political rights of the Declaration only applied to 4.3 million French citizens out of a population of almost 30 million. Rights argued to be natural, endowed in the very essence of human beings, could actually only be exercised by a minority of wealthy, well-educated men. This sort of hypocrisy in declaring all people equal, yet providing a legal basis to social inequality, would be a major source of tension both for the Revolution and for centuries of suffrage and civil rights movements in the Western world.

    There were feminist voices who openly opined about the unfairness and inequality within the Declaration. Olympe de Gouges, an early feminist, campaigned mightily against the injustice of women being treated as the second sex. In 1791 she published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, in which she launched a blistering attack on marriage as a form of social control and the subordination of women in society generally. She complained that France refused to educate its women, and then used their resulting ignorance as an excuse not to afford them the same rights as men. She pointed out the enormous dissonance in at once claiming the “natural rights” of all humanity while also believing that there was a “natural inequality” between the sexes. Politically, she was closer to the moderates of the Revolution, and in the end went to the guillotine with them during the Reign of Terror on the basis of being insufficiently revolutionary. She was, however, quite militant in her views on gender egalitarianism, as well as in her views of abolishing slavery, a position shared only by radical revolutionaries.

    Many within the bourgeoisie had stakes in French colonies and opposed the elimination of the source of their free labor: slaves. Like other imperialist nations, France relied heavily on its overseas possessions and the ruthless extraction of raw materials to feed its economy. There were early abolitionists, much as there was in the United States. These anti-slavery campaigners could not, however, prevent moneyed interests from swaying the Assembly to keep its colonial possessions in 1789. When more radical revolutionaries took over the Revolution in 1794, slavery would be abolished, albeit temporarily. Napoleon would restore it in 1802, feeling it necessary for his ambitions of creating a powerful French empire. By that time, however, the democratic values of the French Revolution and the intrinsic savagery of slavery had already inspired revolution in the colonies. Most famously, the Republic of Haiti was founded in 1804 after a successful slave uprising in Saint-Domingue. Toussaint Louverture, the most famous leader of the Haitian slave revolt, drew direct inspiration from the political philosophy advocated by the French revolutionaries, even if most revolutionaries themselves did not intend for their ideals to be extended to people outside their race and class.

    Leaders of the Bourgeois Revolution

    One of the main authors of the Declaration was Honoré Mirabeau, a nobleman who had never been completely accepted by his class. An adventurer and Lothario, he became mired in scandal for running afoul of the law with numerous seductions and enormous debts that left him estranged from his father. A gifted writer and orator, he opposed absolute monarchy and favored representative government. When the crown summoned the Estates-General, he had to represent the Third Estate because the nobility, the Second Estate, would not endorse him. Mirabeau and other moderate reformers sought to compromise with the king and induce him to accept a much more limited role in the government. Those revolutionaries who wanted a true republic, with the monarchy abolished and power firmly in the hands of the peoples’ representatives, remained in the minority. Due to his extensive debts, however, Mirabeau was primed for venality after his rapid political ascendancy. He conspired with the Queen, the Austrian Marie Antoinette, to return more power to the king. Most controversially, he fought for and won power for King Louis to suspend legislation passed by the Assembly for up to four years. He even went as far as to take money directly from Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, Marie Antoinette’s brother. It is impossible to know how much of his deeds in the early Revolution were motivated out of seeking compromise with the royal court and to what degree he was actually acting as a covert agent of counterrevolution. Mirabeau died in 1791, well before the Revolution had ended. A few years later, his backroom deals with the French and Austrian courts came to light and forever tarnished his legacy, turning him from a revolutionary hero to a villain.

    Abbe Sieyès, whose pamphlet “What is the Third Estate?” inspired the bourgeois class to embrace the Revolution, hoped to use political change to create a culture “devoted to the peaceful pursuit of material comfort.” Like Mirabeau, he did not come from the bourgeois, but as an abbot was technically part of the First Estate. Unlike Mirabeau, however, he did not distance himself from the interests of his social rank. He fought against the abolition of tithes to the Church and wanted to preserve some of the clergy’s special rights under feudalism. These positions put him at odds with the liberal current of the early Revolution and rendered him virtually irrelevant in the latter stages of the Revolution. He managed to survive the Reign of Terror, primarily by opportunistically renouncing his faith. He remained a dedicated supporter of the monarchy throughout the Revolution and, like most moderates, would have settled for a constitution giving greater power to the bourgeoisie. Without his pamphlet, there could not have been a Revolution, but he soon lost any means by which he could direct the Revolution as it evolved.

    Perhaps the most famous of the prominent moderate leaders of the French Revolution had already made a name for himself fighting in the American Revolution in the previous decade. Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, had fought on the side of the U.S. insurgents 180px-aduc_029_lafayette_28m-p-j-2c_1757-183429in their war with Britain, and for his part in that successful uprising came to be seen as a war hero for defeating the British and as a darling of liberal intellectuals who admired the U.S. republic. An anti-absolutist aristocrat like Mirabeau, Lafayette was prepared to protect the king as long as he agreed to accept democratic reforms. He became the commander of the National Guard, the popular militia based in Paris, and worked with his old friend Jefferson in the crafting of the Constitution. He never forged a lasting alliance with Mirabeau, despite their similar roots, possibly because Lafayette appeared (initially) as an incorruptible general, whereas Mirabeau was a sly, cunning politician stained by his excesses. Paradoxically, while Lafayette’s popularity cut across class lines, no class fully trusted him. To the upper classes, he was a traitor, siding with the “mob” against his own social order. Simultaneously, the working classes viewed him as an outsider, a member of the military — that institution the old repressive regime had used without remorse to stamp out any dissent.

    The bourgeois leaders of the early Revolution uniformly favored a peaceful transition to a constitutional monarchy but failed to accomplish this goal. This failure did not result from any one personality but from an overall inability to address one of the core causes for the Revolution: the lack of affordable food. Riots in major cities over bread became common, with more radical revolutionaries organizing demonstrations about food insecurity. In October, the king exacerbated conditions by changing his mind about accepting reform. He rejected the abolition of feudalism and most elements of the Declaration. This incensed the revolutionaries, who directed the working poor to march on the royal court in Versailles. Popular mobilization became the main tool by which the revolutionaries could put pressure on the crown. The nucleus of the march were the women from the urban poor, whose duties included purchasing bread for their families in the marketplaces. They became the symbols of the march, now known as the Women’s March on Versailles. Lafayette and his National Guardsmen accompanied the women, much to the chagrin of Lafayette, who as a man of law and order disapproved of such disorderly protest. When the marchers reached Versailles and demanded to see the king, Lafayette intervened personally to defend Louis and the even more unpopular foreign-born Marie Antoinette. Ever fearing actual conflict, Louis backed down on his stance against the Assembly’s measures. The revolutionaries also demanded, however, that he leave Versailles and return to the royal palace in Paris, the Tuileries. The revolutionaries feared (with some justification) that from his Versailles palace, the king could better orchestrate a royalist mutiny in one of his strongholds than in the national capitol. Again, Louis acquiesced and returned to Paris. Just as with the seizure of the Bastille, the working class had, through a show of popular action and force, exposed the hollowness of the monarchy as a political power. The bourgeoisie, represented by Lafayette, only cautiously went along with it all. His intervention spared the royal couple this time, but he could not save them forever.

    Calm Before the Storm

    In 1790, the French Revolution appeared to be winding down. King Louis had accepted all measures passed by the Assembly, and the Assembly was working on the new constitution. In July, the Assembly passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which effectively turned Catholic priests and bishops into state employees. The Pope and the Catholic Church resisted this, as it would make the church in France part of the state, rather than under the control of Rome. In the eyes of many, the church was a corrupt institution divorced from its original holy mission, serving only to prop up tyrants and keep its followers docile. Many more French people, however, remained faithful to the traditional role of the church, even if they disliked its excesses. King Louis especially disapproved of the church losing its ability to extract tithes from the population, and the Revolution’s “war on religion” would become a driving force when some of the peasantry did eventually rise up against the revolutionary government. The French clergy mostly refused to take an oath swearing loyalty to the state, the vast majority becoming “non-jurors” more loyal to the Pope than France. This would create a schism in France that would not be mended until 1801, when Napoleon made peace with the church.

    July 1790 also witnessed the Fête de la Fédération, a massive celebration of the previous year and all the progress made since the Revolution started. Although the constitution had not yet been finished, public figures — including the royal family — took public oaths pledging themselves to the powers and limitations granted to them by the coming legal framework for what was still widely expected to be a constitutional monarchy. Ordinary people attended mass and then got lost in drinking and dancing. It was to be a fleeting moment of seeming reconciliation in deeply divided France. It would soon be shown that King Louis had no intention of accepting constitutional checks on his power. Many moderate political figures would meet their downfall attempting to keep the peace between scheming royalists and the working class, most of whom were skeptical of the king’s motives and worried the National Assembly would also betray their support.

    Since the Revolution started, many aristocrats had emigrated to neighboring countries in Europe, and even the United States. These émigrés included the aunts of King Louis, and many suspected that Louis, his wife and children would also go abroad, where other European monarchs would join him in his desire to regain absolute power. This was a key reason in why the French people had demanded that Louis and his family live in Paris. Many royalists, however, resented the king being a prisoner in his own palace, and in February 1791, royalists went to the Tuileries Palace with concealed weapons after Lafayette had led the National Guard out of the city to put down riots. The royalists said they feared for the safety of the king, while the Guardsmen at the palace who confronted them worried the royalists had come to lead a counterrevolution. Lafayette returned to Paris and induced the king to order the royalists disarmed and sent away. This event, known as the “Day of Daggers,” further damaged the monarchy among its supporters and its critics. Supporters believed Louis had spurned a chance to retake power, while those hostile to the crown claimed it proved counterrevolutionary forces were stirring.

    The Flight of Varennes & the Champ de Mars Massacre

    In June 1791 Louis made a mistake that would cost him his life. In disguise, the royal family set off for the fortress town of Montmédy in the east, where they hoped to start a counterrevolution. They were recognized in their travels, however, and in the town of Varennes, the local postmaster had them arrested. As in October 1789, the royal family returned to Paris, but this time the public would not forgive them. Louis had been given multiple chances to recognize and respect the Revolution, but had shown himself to be unreliable in this regard. Those politicians who wanted a republic rather than a constitutional monarchy gained credibility. Most of these politicians belonged to a political organization informally known as the Cordeliers Club (the Jacobin Club would become much more famous and powerful later on, but at this time they were fairly moderate). The Cordeliers petitioned for Louis to be removed from the throne, or at least that there be a public referendum on whether to keep the monarchy at all. In July, a group of protestors gathered in the Champ de Mars to demonstrate against the king. Lafayette and his National Guard arrived and found stones and insults hurtling in their direction. The National Guard opened fire, killing dozens of people. Lafayette, his reputation already tarnished by his permitting the king to flee Paris, never recovered from the Champ de Mars massacre. The Revolution lost one of its foremost moderating figures.

    In the aftermath of the slaughter, the revolutionary government sought to mitigate the damage by suppressing radical politicians and publications as seditious. Two prominent members of the Cordeliers Club, Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins, had been present at the Champ de Mars protest and now went underground. So did a physician-turned-revolutionary named Jean-Paul Marat. Marat had started his own newspaper, L’Ami du peuple (“The People’s friend”), in which he praised the urban poor (the sans-culottes) and launched increasingly blistering polemics against the monarchists and moderates in the Assembly. He suffered from a painful skin condition, and his decision to flee into the Paris sewers whenever he upset the authorities did him no dermatological favors. Another newspaper, Le Père Duchesne, appealed to the masses because it was written from a first person point of view, that of the titular Old Man Duchesne, a grumpy working class man with a pipe. The rants of Duchesne were laden with profanity to help give them the common touch. The man behind Duchesne was Jacques Hébert, who like many revolutionaries initially endorsed the idea of a constitutional monarchy, but then sharply turned his ire against the monarchy following the flight to Varennes.

    In September 1791 the new constitution finally went into effect. Most power remained with the representative Assembly members, but the king retained veto power over legislation and could appoint and remove ministers. After the constitution’s passage, the National Constituent Assembly was dissolved and a new Legislative Assembly formed (in the interests of hindering careerism, members of the former could not be members of the latter). The new Assembly soon ran into trouble after its first meeting in October. From the outset, the king did not shy away from using his veto power to protect noble émigrés plotting counterrevolution abroad as well as clergy members who continued to refuse to take a loyalty oath to the government. Still, the Assembly mostly remained loyal to the king. Members of the monarchist Feuillant Club held the reigns of government and considered the Revolution completed. The second-largest group, the Jacobin Club, remained a broad tent that favored an overall centrist position.

    As we shall see in the next entry, the Revolution was not over. The ordinary hard-working people of France, especially the sans-culottes in the cities, continued to demand reasonable prices and chafed at the huge property inequality between themselves and the “big bourgeoisie.” Also, even with the king in Paris, the possibility of counterrevolution continued to grow, with foreign kings and domestic royalists threatening to put the Revolution under siege. War was imminent, and naturally the people took on a more patriotic and radical mentality. The moderate bourgeois stage of the Revolution was ending, soon to be replaced by the more halcyon days of the radical period.

    Bibliography

    Andress, David. The French Revolution and the People. A&C Black, 2004.

    Censer, Jack R. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution. Penn State Press, 2001.

    Doyle, William. The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford Paperbacks, 1989.

    Gottschalk, Louis Reichenthal. Jean Paul Marat. University of Chicago Press, 1967.

    Hibbert, Christopher. The Days of the French Revolution. William Morrow & Company, 1981.

    Hobsbawm, Eric. Age of Revolution: 1789-1848. Hachette UK, 2010.

    James, Cyril Lionel Robert. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Penguin UK, 2001.

    Landes, Joan B. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Cornell University Press, 1988.

    Lefebvre, Georges. The French Revolution. Vol. 2. Columbia University Press, 1964.

    Luttrell, Barbara. Mirabeau. Southern Illinois University Press, 1990.

    McGarr, Paul. “The Great French Revolution.” International Socialism 43 (1989): 15-110.

    Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. Penguin UK, 2004.

    Tackett, Timothy. When the King took Flight. Harvard University Press, 2009.

    Unger, Harlow Giles. Lafayette. John Wiley & Sons, 2002.

    Wallerstein, Immanuel. “Citizens All? Citizens Some! The Making of the Citizen.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45.04 (2003): 650-679.
    Last edited by Gracchus Babeuf; June 14, 2018 at 09:26 AM.

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    Gracchus Babeuf's Avatar Laetus
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    Default Re: The French Revolution: A History

    The Second Revolution of 1792

    As 1791 ended, it appeared that the French Revolution had concluded. King Louis XVI, though clearly not dependable in his acceptance of political change, remained in the Tuileries Palace in Paris, where he could be prevented from orchestrating intrigues against the Revolution. The Legislative Assembly had come under the control of a new political organization, the moderate Feuillants Club, that wished to move the Revolution away from the streets and the crowd and into their own hands as elected representatives. Radical revolutionaries, who preferred a more democratic republic to a constitutional monarchy where King Louis still held power, found themselves confined to the fringes. As we shall see, however, the Revolution was not yet complete. It would be advanced and radicalized by a series of events both abroad and within France.

    Many French royalists had fled the Revolution from its outset, moving eastward into the states comprising modern Germany. Most were aristocrats, and used their status to agitate the rulers of the fading Holy Roman Empire and up-and-coming Prussia to intervene in France. Their efforts focused on Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, brother of Louis XVI’s Queen Marie Antoinette. Leopold, however, was reluctant to do so for numerous reasons. Firstly, the Holy Roman Empire had sharply declined since the Peace of Westphalia had fragmented it into several independent polities in 1648 following a devastating religious conflict. Secondly, if the German states turned their focus to France, Catherine the Great of Russia would have the freedom to invade Poland and the Ottoman Empire, tilting the European balance of power in her favor. Third, the German states benefitted from a weak and disorderly France. The strongest state in Europe had become the most disunited and disorganized. After the revolutionary government imprisoned Louis and Marie Antoinette following their failed flight to Varennes, however, Leopold felt compelled to act. In August 1791, he issued the Pillnitz Declaration along with Frederick William II of Prussia, stating that there would be war with France if – and only if – the major European states formed a coalition for that purpose. This unlikely condition rendered the announcement something of an idle threat.

    In France, however, revolutionary leaders seized on the Declaration as evidence of a grand conspiracy to restore Louis to power, to surely be followed by harsh royalist revenge. If war was inevitable, some politicians argued, why not attack first and take the initiative? Jacques Pierre Brissot, the head of the French Legislative Assembly, led the pro-war camp in the French government. A centrist republican, he believed that war would unite the polarized French populace by promoting a rally-round-the-flag mentality. He also thought war would stimulate the moribund French economy, increasing the demand for arms, supplies and other materials needed for conflict. Additionally, he assumed French soldiers would be greeted as liberators in places like Belgium and the Netherlands, which were then under Austrian dominion. At Brissot’s instigation, France declared war on the Holy Roman Empire on April 20, 1792. It soon became apparent, however, that Brissot and his allies had been unfounded in their optimism. French forces suffered defeat after defeat – much to the delight of the royal family and their sympathizers, who had watched with glee as the revolutionaries had seemingly sprinted toward their ruin.

    Internally, the French working classes remained discontent. A poor harvest in 1792 led to yet more scarcity of bread. Merchants again hoarded their supplies to drive up prices. This led to the rise of a very loose movement called the Enragés (“The Madmen”), including a priest-turned-politician named Jacques Roux. Proto-socialists, they demanded the implementation of price controls and argued for a more economically equal society. The French urban poor, the sans-culottes, were mostly self-employed, so it made more sense for them to fight for set prices as opposed to higher wages. Before this point, the sans-culottes had entrusted the Revolution to its bourgeois leaders. After 1792, however, they became much more politically involved, patronizing the growing number of political clubs.

    Girondins & Jacobins

    The preeminent club in 1791 had been the aforementioned Feuillants, who supported constitutional monarchy and reconciliation with the king. Their opposition to the 1792 declaration of war, however, led to them being labeled royalists and they were expelled from the Legislative Assembly. “Feuillant” became synonymous with “monarchist.” Following their downfall, power shifted to the Girondins, republicans so-named for their ties to the Gironde, a region in the southwest of France. They made up a majority in the Jacobin Club, although not all belonged to it. They represented the bourgeoisie and most had initially supported a constitutional monarch until King Louis’ flight shattered their faith in the crown to respect their liberal values. Brissot led them in the Assembly, inducing them to vote for war and to support the policy of spreading the Revolution by force. Before 1792, the Girondins would have been considered moderate left-wing members in the Assembly, but with the expulsion of the Feuillants, they became the leading right-wing faction by default.

    The Girondins contended with the more radical Cordelier Club. The Cordeliers featured in the previous entry as the group that had organized demonstrations against the monarchy following the flight to Varennes. The Cordeliers were populist republicans that had argued from the outset of the Revolution that ultimate political authority belonged with the people, and that any body lacking the consent of the governed was illegitimate. In terms of leadership, they followed Georges Danton, a boisterous orator with a taste for extravagance, and Camille Desmoulins, a young political pamphleteer. There was also the Montagne (“Mountain”) minority within the Jacobins. They earned their sobriquet by sitting on the highest benches in the Assembly. The Montagnards opposed the war campaign waged by the Girondins, and their leader, Maximilien Robespierre, pointed out that nobody likes “armed missionaries.” What would most define the Montagnards from their Girondist rivals, however, would be their later support for the trial and execution of King Louis and his wife.

    With the war going badly, the Girondist leadership in the Assembly sought to remove the remaining vestiges of royal power, for fear that Louis’ guards would aid the Austrian and Prussian invaders. Louis, however, moved to stop the dissolution of his bodyguard as well as the mustering of 20,000 volunteers to Paris. Once again mobilizing the people as a political tool, the Girondins organized a demonstration that soon escalated into a crowd entering the royal palace and haranguing Louis to his face. Alarmed by this activity in Paris as well as the poor course of the war, the Marquis de Lafayette came to the capital and condemned the republicans now leading the revolutionary government. He attempted to organize a coup to overthrow the Jacobins, but misread the public mood as well as his own support. Not only did most people support the Jacobins, they also remembered that Lafayette had led the troops that fired on the protesters in the 1791 Champ de Mars massacre. His political career was over, but the French government was so desperate for skilled officers that rather than arrest or exile him, Lafayette received command over the Army of the North. This could, however, be tantamount to a death sentence. At the outbreak of the war, Théobald Dillon, an aristocratic officer like Lafayette, had been killed by his own troops, who suspected Dillon had purposefully lost a recent battle.

    Lafayette’s aborted coup attempt and the murder of Dillon show just how radicalized much of the population had become. When the government clamored for citizens to join the army and defend France from her enemies, hundreds of thousands volunteered. A contingent from Marseille arrived in Paris with their own song, “The Marseillaise,” which became the national anthem of France. The lyrics beckon citizens to take up arms against the “horde of slaves, of traitors and conspiratorial kings” coming to “cut the throats” of French women and children. In the past, men had been forced to fight on behalf of monarchs that did not represent them or their interests. The average French soldier of the medieval and early modern periods had no stake in the succession crises and religious conflicts that motivated wars. In the wars of the French Revolution, however, soldiers were fighting to defend the rights and freedoms they had won, however imperfect and incomplete. For all its faults, at least the Legislative Assembly was more accountable than the old feudal order.

    There was also, as ever, the great fear that ordinary people would receive the worst punishment if the monarchy returned to absolute power. This dread grew colossally with the release of a manifesto by the Duke of Brunswick in July 1792. Charles William Ferdinand, the Duke of Brunswick, led the Austro-Prussian army marching on Paris, and released the document in the hopes of hastening surrender. A member of a cadet branch of the House of Bourbon had actually written it, and a copy of it approved clandestinely by Louis and Marie Antoinette. The Brunswick Manifesto stated that the Austro-Prussian forces would restore Louis and his queen to their previous positions. If any harm befell the royal family, the Manifesto promised, Paris would be burned and rebels subjected “to the death they have deserved.” Rather than intimidating the French people into submission, it resolved most of them to take even more extreme action to prevent the failure of the Revolution, which now hung on the precipice. Sensing that a second revolution was possible, the Cordeliers and the Jacobin Montagnards began to strategize.

    The Second Revolution

    On August 10, 1792, around 20,000 members of the National Guard marched on the Tuileries Palace. Twenty-eight of the 48 districts of Paris had pledged themselves to this new resurrection. Most of the National Guardsmen protecting the palace defected to the attackers. Instead of staying to fight, Louis and the rest of his family took shelter with the National Assembly. Royalist defenders, however, remained adamant in safeguarding their positions. The Swiss Guard refused to surrender despite overwhelming odds. The rebels won in the end, taking around 300 casualties while the royalist forces lost about 600 men. As with the storming of the Bastille, the insurrectionists placed heads on pikes and paraded them through the streets of Paris. Among the slain was the possibility of compromise. Louis, in typical fashion, had saved his own skin when his life was in the balance, but he had exhausted what little good faith had remained between him and the people. The Girondists, who had wavered once their gamble with the war went poorly, could not block a challenge from below. From this point, the Revolution would still be steered by the bourgeoisie, but by marginal figures like Danton and Robespierre. Their base was the sans-culottes. These city-dwelling artisans were mainly interested in universal suffrage and a rough vision of utopian socialism. Their top priority in the 1792 was saving the revolution.

    The September Massacres

    In early September bands of sans-culottes cut through Paris prisons killing jailed nobles and their sympathizers. The September Massacres remain one of the most divisive events of the Revolution. On one hand, the Austro-Prussian troops had captured the city of Verdun in Lorraine and were less than 200 miles from Paris. Those lords and ladies locked away in their cells could, potentially, become a fifth column for the invaders. Moreover, most prisoners received some form of tribunal before their executions. Of course, these tribunals hardly concerned themselves with fair representation and due process, but sometimes individuals were spared if they had no obvious royalist connections. How much of a threat the victims of the Massacres would have been had Paris been taken will forever be unknown. It is difficult to fathom how much of a difference the Princess of Lamballe, Marie Antoinette’s close friend, would have had if she had not been decapitated and her head strutted around Marie Antoinette’s window. Perhaps the modern analogue to the Massacres would be the occasional riots that transpire in the West among disadvantaged and dispossessed communities. Such riots tend to be limited to the stealing of property, not lives, and tend to do great economic damage to looters’ own neighborhoods. They are best regarded as actions signifying desperation and despair. The Massacres must be seen as similar light, as actions stemming more from emotion than logic. The average man or woman in the street probably did not believe Paris would be left standing in a few weeks and, already starving and resentful, had very little to lose. They could secure the Revolution and, by extension, their lives, but only if they mercifully rooted out anyone possibly aiding the royalist cause. For this reason, most of the people killed during the coming Reign of Terror were not nobles, as in the September Massacres, but the moderate revolutionaries who had pursued some reconciliation with the royal court in the moderate stage of the Revolution.

    After the second revolution of August 10, the Legislative Assembly suspended the monarchy and called for new elections to select a National Convention to draft a new constitution. Once more, the relatively moderate Girondins led the legislative body, although it did not have an overwhelming majority. It would be more apt to say that most delegates to the Convention fell somewhere between the Girondins and the left-wing factions, switching their votes along with their interests. Soon after the Convention’s first meeting on September 20, the French army secured a decisive victory over the Prussians at Valmy, the start of a dramatic reversal in the course of the war. As the Prussians absconded back across the Rhine, the Convention felt heartened enough to dissolve the monarchy and declare the First French Republic. The Girondins next found themselves with a dilemma as what to do about the now dethroned Louis and his wife. The events of August 10 had been predicated on bringing the king to justice for collaborating with France’s enemies; to not put him on trial would be an injustice itself. It also followed that if Louis was guilty of treason then he had to die. Further damage was done to Louis in the court of public opinion when a locksmith discovered a hidden cache of over 700 documents in one of the king’s armoires. These exposed his correspondence with various promoters of counterrevolution, as well as with Mirabeau, the bourgeois leader of the early Revolution who had taken Austrian bribes. Whatever shred of trust remained in the public mind in regards to the king had to have been left in tatters. It also disgraced the Girondins who still argued for pardoning the king and, at the very least, using him as a hostage in future peace treaty negotiations. Now there would have to be a formal punishment for Louis for his crimes.

    The Trial & Execution of Louis XVI

    The trial started in December 1792. It was during this time that Robespierre earned his place as a voice of the extremist tendency of the revolution. Possessing a serious streak and a sour disposition, he was known as being so imbued with revolutionary virtue as to be incorruptible. In contrast to Danton, gluttonous and gregarious, Robespierre was introverted and somber. He opposed slavery and the death penalty. He had the calculating mind of a lawyer, but in this sense was not unlike the Founding Fathers of the United States, who had stated the reasons for their separation from Great Britain in a legal format. Yet, the U.S., as a colony, could detach itself from the British Empire, its institutions and traditions. The French Republic had to resolve the question of a monarch in their midst, one who made it plain it would never accept a constitution, much less true democracy. As long as Louis lived, there would be a figure for royalists to rally around and restore. There would be civil war whether he was deposed or not, given his support for counterrevolution, so how could the Revolution be safe with Louis alive? “Louis must die so that the nation may live,” Robespierre argued. In middle of January, the National Convention deputies found Louis guilty. Not one voted for his innocence. There was some attempt at a reprieve, but this was voted down, 380 to 310. The Girondins had split.

    The majority of the bourgeois deputies did not want to commit regicide. Even the most ideologically committed republicans feared the reckoning that would follow, not just by the Austro-Prussian invaders, but by those among the French population who had tolerated the Revolution as long the monarchy was in some way preserved. The monarchy, though, had not just protested reform but acted to undo it. There could be no compromise with Louis, and the sans-culottes would ensure that the Convention lived up to its egalitarian rhetoric. If the Convention deputies knew Louis to be guilty, of which there could be no question, how could they not eliminate an enemy of the state without looking like hypocrites, willing to treat Louis as above the law just because of his bloodline? On January 21, 1793, Louis was beheaded before the people as a criminal. Marie Antoinette would go to the scaffold later in the year. They had not worked toward counterrevolution alone, though. They still accomplices among the elite, as evidenced by his uncovered letters of correspondence. The Convention would continue to make inquiry into conspiracies against the Revolution paramount.

    In March, the Convention founded a Revolutionary Tribunal strictly for trying cases related to political offenses. Around the same time, the Revolution suffered major setbacks. Charles François Dumouriez, one of the two victorious revolutionary generals and Valmy, had aligned himself with the Girondists and opposed the execution of Louis. After failing to persuade his troops to attack Paris and overthrow the Jacobins, he defected to the Austro-Prussian army in April 1793. At the same, a royalist revolt broke out in central western France, led by an improvised Royal and Catholic Army. This “war in the Vendée” had been a long time coming. Unlike in other parts of the country, nobles in the Vendée tended to work alongside their peasants, and thus the class stratification between the aristocracy and commoners was less pronounced. There was also popular displeasure with the subordination of the Catholic Church to the state. The issue that sparked open rebellion, however, had been an effort to impose widespread conscription. Peasants resisted being drafted to fight for a government they did not support. There was a perception, with some basis, that Paris held an inordinate amount of influence over the Revolution, at the expense of provinces like the Vendée and the Gironde. This division only sharpened the already polarized Convention along factional lines.

    In the next entry, we will see how these events emphasized the need for the Revolution to defend itself against its enemies. There is some justification for the classical Marxist interpretation that the Reign of Terror was vindicated as self-defense. Yet, it is also true that the Terror was not a sustainable enterprise with the exceedingly high standards Robespierre set for himself and his fellow revolutionaries. He could not kill his enemies fast enough because they multiplied with every execution. The Reign of Terror only lasted a year, but its legacy remains one of the most divisive topics in history.

    Bibliography
    Brinton, Crane. The Jacobins: An Essay in the New History. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011.
    Censer, Jack R. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution. Penn State Press, 2001.
    Doyle, William. The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford Paperbacks, 1989.
    Hibbert, Christopher. The Days of the French Revolution. William Morrow & Company, 1981.
    Lefebvre, Georges. The French Revolution. Vol. 2. Columbia University Press, 1964.
    Linton, Marisa, Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution. Oxford University Press, 2013.
    McGarr, Paul. “The Great French Revolution.” International Socialism 43 (1989): 15-110.
    McPhee, Peter. Robespierre: a Revolutionary Life. Yale University Press, 2012.
    Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. Penguin UK, 2004.
    Scurr, Ruth. Fatal purity: Robespierre and the French revolution. Random House, 2012.
    Whaley, Leigh Ann. Radicals: Politics and Republicanism in the French Revolution. Gloucestershire, England: Sutton Publishing, 2000.

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